Posted
by
samzenpuson Monday December 10, 2012 @02:13PM
from the get-on-the-wagon dept.

Hugh Pickens writes writes "AP reports that if disaster strikes a US nuclear power plant, the utility industry wants the ability to fly in heavy-duty equipment from regional hubs to stricken reactors to avert a meltdown providing another layer of defense in case a Fukushima-style disaster destroys a nuclear plant's multiple backup systems. 'It became very clear in Japan that utilities became quickly overwhelmed,' says Joe Pollock, vice president for nuclear operations at the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry lobbying group that is spearheading the effort. US nuclear plants already have backup safety systems and are supposed to withstand the worst possible disasters in their regions, including hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and earthquakes. But planners can be wrong. The industry plan, called FLEX, is the nuclear industry's method for meeting new US Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules that will force 65 plants in the US to get extra emergency equipment on site and store it protectively. The FLEX program is supposed to help nuclear plants handle the biggest disasters. Under the plan, plant operators can summon help from the regional centers in Memphis and Phoenix. In addition to having several duplicate sets of plant emergency gear, industry officials say the centers will likely have heavier equipment that could include an emergency generator large enough to power a plant's emergency cooling systems, equipment to treat cooling water and extra radiation protection gear for workers. Federal regulators must still decide whether to approve the plans submitted by individual plants. 'They need to show us not just that they have the pump, but that they've done all the appropriate designing and engineering so that they have a hookup for that pump,' says NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said. 'They're not going to be trying to figure out, "Where are we going to plug this thing in?"'"

Where did you get your information? Many SMRs are designed to lessen the danger of materials being stolen or misplaced. Nuclear reactor fuel is low-enriched uranium, or has a concentration of less than 20% 235U. This low quantity, non-weapons-grade uranium makes the fuel less desirable for weapons production. Once the fuel has been irradiated, the fission products mixed with the fissile materials are highly radioactive and require special handling to remove safely, another non-proliferation feature.Reactor

And where would you consider to be a "safe" area in the US that has no storms, no earthquakes, etc? And is also somewhat accessible and relatively close to a large population center?

I know this was just snark but here goes: There is a significant variation in the US when it comes to disasters. Everyone likes to think that disasters are truly random, but then again everyone (in general) is terrible at assessing risk. You don't have to look very hard to find areas that receive significantly fewer damaging hurricanes, damaging tornadoes, damaging earthquakes, damaging floods/tsunamis, damaging wildfires, etc. Do you really think that everywhere in the US is as prone to calamity as, say,

I know this was just snark but here goes: There is a significant variation in the US when it comes to disasters. Everyone likes to think that disasters are truly random, but then again everyone (in general) is terrible at assessing risk. You don't have to look very hard to find areas that receive significantly fewer damaging hurricanes, damaging tornadoes, damaging earthquakes, damaging floods/tsunamis, damaging wildfires, etc. Do you really think that everywhere in the US is as prone to calamity as, say, S

Fukishima was just fine, until it was hit by a once-in-a-thousand-years disaster....tornado, flood, or earthquake? Or the plants in Minnesota don't get hit with it, maybe your plant in Oregon does. Or Vermont. Or Indiana.....

WTF? Fukishima was not "just fine", nor was it hit by a once-in-a-thousand-years disaster. It was a poorly maintained plant, with a history of safety issues [wikipedia.org]. Heck, in 2007 and 2008, TEPCO and the AEC released reports citing concerns over how the plant would handle a tsunami, or

It was "just as fine" as other for-profit nuclear power plants run around the world. You came sooooo close to cigar of the real problem with nuclear power: the profit motive. As long as there is a buck to be made, corners will be cut, especially when you put the industry in charge of it's own oversight....like what's happened in the U.S. and Japan.

To be specific about how wrong you are about almost everything: yes disasters can happen anywhere, at any time. But NO, there is NOT the same chance of a major earthquake happening in Minnesota, as there is of one happening in southern California. And to that end, the list of disasters is not infinitely long, as you suggest, which is the only way that the net disaster rate for any given spot on the surface of the earth could be the same. Some places are far far far safer to live than others. Deal with i

But NO, there is NOT the same chance of a major earthquake happening in Minnesota, as there is of one happening in southern California.

Just how stupid are you, really? The point - the obvious one that you somehow managed to miss - is that even "safe" areas like Minnesota can still have the occasional earthquake or F5 tornado, and your plant had better be able to handle it.

"But but but those kind of disasters are soooo rare that you're a fool to worry about it" fanboys like yourself bleat - like you did fi

Thank you for providing the textbook demonstration of the human nature of completely fucking up risk assessment. I couldn't have said it better myself. You pointed out all the things that are wrong with demand driven disaster planning, right down to the complete misunderstanding of what terms like "once-in-a-thousand-years" means. Kudos!

Thank you for providing the textbook demonstration of the human nature of completely fucking up risk assessment. I couldn't have said it better myself. You pointed out all the things that are wrong with demand driven disaster planning, right down to the complete misunderstanding of what terms like "once-in-a-thousand-years" means. Kudos!

Thanks for the projection. The last time Fukishima was hit with an earthquake of that magnitude was around a thousand years ago. The chances of "rare" disaster like happen

Based on the references, it's a 1/26316 chance per year of a damaging earthquake. Seems fairly safe to me, especially when you consider that there's virtually no risk from tornados, hurricanes, flooding or volcanos.

So over the lifetime of the station, that's 1/1000 of blowing up*. That's about 10 times more likely than you dying in a car accident of some sort in the US over the same time period. Seems pretty unsafe to me.

Anyway, you can't put a nuclear station anywhere, it needs massive amount of water for cooling, so it requires a major river or an ocean nearby.

What mesmerizes me, is that its only now that they are discussing this addition. That's an obvious need, when the station is flooded (as what almost happened

And where would you consider to be a "safe" area in the US that has no storms, no earthquakes, etc? And is also somewhat accessible and relatively close to a large population center?

I would think earthquakes are the only one of those disasters that are really hard to deal with. Floods? Pretty much anywhere has a few local high spots that won't flood. If not - make one. Storms? You can always follow the "add more concrete" school of engineering, I guess, but I'm guessing nuclear plants normal construction probably makes them all but immune to wind already.

So really, find a geologically stable area, and you can deal with the other problems.

(The estimates are neither the highest nor the lowest for nuclear power to give it the least death toll. Check the comments if you want the worst, in which case it will no longer be the absolute best but it'll still be a very good option up there with all the other non-burning tech).

The problem isn't that nuclear safety is bad, the problem is it's very very easy to see the results of nuclear safety failures compared to other safety failures because nuclear plants are so compact relatively speaking that you get a "holy fuck" disaster that kills a bunch of people every few decades instead of thousands of isolated one-offs. And while it's possible nuclear deaths are under-reported, I'm not convinced that it's more likely than other energy forms -- it's relatively easy to look for things that can be attributed to a nuclear accident because again, it's so concentrated by comparison.

Given the consequences of an accident, the safety record of nuclear power is appalling.

If you have any concept of critical thinking, this sentence is appalling. What does the safety record (which is still 0 fatalities, 0 health side effects, 0 long term ecological disruptions) have to do with the potential outcome of an accident? The same can't be said for any other form of large scale energy production in the US, let alone almost every other human pursuit. Coal kills, and that is appalling.

So Chernobyl had zero deaths and zero health side effects and zero long-term ecological disruptions? I'd be interested in knowing your sources for that because they conflict with the news reports I was listening to when it happened.

So Chernobyl had zero deaths and zero health side effects and zero long-term ecological disruptions? I'd be interested in knowing your sources for that because they conflict with the news reports I was listening to when it happened.

This discussion is specific to the US, which despite having many more nuclear plants than the former USSR, never had an incident remotely similar to Chernobyl. So no when we are talking about US plants and US responses, you don't get to include that.

OK. Here you go. Not to be rude, but I have a hunch you have a narrow definition that you haven't disclosed. Anyway, you can look at the fatalities and ecological disruptions, e.g. tritium and strontium in local water supplies, and see if they fit into your position.

OT: The links don't include ongoing problems uranium mining like the Atlas Mine Project in Moab, UT [grandcanyontrust.org] which are eliminated if we don't consider coal mining.

Safety-wise, Chernobly is as about as related to a US Nuclear plant as to an atomic bomb test. It's not in any way relevent to a disucssion about power in the US.

Fukushima wasn't far form many US designs, and TFA was about addressing the safety issues "discovered" (perhaps "uncovered") by that disaster - which was still tiny compared to the damage wrought by the tsunami that caused it.

Given the consequences of an accident, the safety record of nuclear power is appalling.

Well, we actually have enough time to have real statistics and not fear-mongering. There have been ~4,000 deaths due to nuclear power accidents, with all but 60 being long-term cancers. Maybe Fukishima will prove to cause an additional 2,000 deaths in 20 years, so lets call it 6k.

In the US in the past 100 years there have been over 100k coal mining deaths. China alone had 6k coal mining deaths in 2004! Wind power (ba

Energy density of uranium versus coal is absolutely irrelevant since uranium, as used in powerplants, does not exist in nature. In order to create uranium pellets usable for electric generation, pitchblende - a rare mineral - has to be mined, from which the yellowcake is extracted, at a ratio of two tons of ore to one kilogram of yellowcake. Uranium oxides are then extracted with the help of acid from yellowcake. There is further processing involved before fuel pellets can be made.

In a 10 minute search there were no records of coal power plant deaths, nor were there records of uranium mining deaths. The miners of both coal and uranium have a high rate of lung cancer, but normalizing back to deaths per GWh electrical energy will still heavily favor nuclear. The point remains, there is no perfect source of power, and we are stuck choosing between some bad sources. In the balance, nuclear is clearly no worse than coal. An honest case can even be made for nuclear being only slightly

Don't build them in areas subject to storms, earthquakes, etc., and don't cut corners on the design, construction, maintenance, and inspections in order to save costs.

There exist no such areas on earth. Every place on the planet can have storms and earthquakes. Plus, you need a large quantity of water available. That limits the geographical areas by quite a lot. Almost all nuke plants are near bodies of water. That alone makes for possible flooding issues.

As for cutting corners, that is largely a myth. Design requirements change over time, and older plants don't all meet current standards. But nothing short of a rebuild would change that. We wouldn't build the plants w

That sounds great if you don't pay attention to anything regarding nuclear power construction.

At least in Western models (I don't know much about Soviet designs), very rarely are corners cut. All fo the reactors that have had problems were Generation 1, even Fukushima. We are currently building Generation III+ designs and working on Gen 4 designs, which all have significantly enhanced safety features. What they should be doing is retiring the Gen I reactors and replacing them with modern designs; a Westi

Serious problems first arose over the vast concrete base slab for the foundation of the reactor building, which the country's Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority found too porous and prone to corrosion. Since then, the authority has blamed Areva for allowing inexperienced subcontractors to drill holes in the wrong places on a vast steel container that seals the reactor.

And the new roof you put on your house will use greatly improved construction methods and materials compared to a roof put up in the 70's. Doesn't mean your new roof doesn't share the same basic hazards as the old one: heat, cold, and precipitation.

No shit Sherlock. Of course the new roof faces the same hazards - that's why I put the new roof on in the first place. What an idiot you are -pretty much all of your "criticisms" amount to the same thing, ignorant hand waving, bible thumping, and name calling.

No shit Sherlock. Of course the new roof faces the same hazards - that's why I put the new roof on in the first place.

Then why is your head buried so deep in your ass, Watson? Too busy engaging in four-letter projection to notice that the point was to debunk the "ohhh but new reactors are soo much safer!" canard - which you just agreed with?

You have billions in construction and refining costs. Billions in operation costs. Hundreds of billions in long term storage costs of nuclear waste - which will be with us for hundreds of years. Billions in insurance costs, most of which are born by the taxpayer as opposed to the for-profit corporation running the reactor.

Don't forget decommissioning. We are currently looking at Â£70,000,000,000 [bbc.co.uk], with the caveat that it might go higher.

"Germany gets the same amount of solar energy as Alaska, but that hasn't stopped them from investing in solar power."Germany is 350,000 km^2m Alaska is 1.7 Mkm^2. That's pretty irrelevant statistic right there. Not that I agree with the rosy picture above, but you just make a fool of yourself and of your opinion by being so grossly partisan.

You mean the NRC run by once-and-future nuclear energy execs? The NRC that just forced out it's chair because he wanted tighter (but less profitable) safety standards after Fukishima? Way to reduce your credbility to zero right out of the gate, Slick, and that's before you call the already-weak sauce oversight "over-regulation".

Actually Japan has more renewable energy available than they need, they just have to capture it. A combination of offshore wind and geothermal, with solar PV on buildings, would be more than enough to meet their needs now and power EVs so they can reduce dependency on oil.

The problem is that it all takes time to set up. People are now saying that actually it is less time than was first though, especially since Japan got through the peak summer demand periods without any issues and only a few working reactor

The problem is that most were build 30 to 40 years ago and environmental protesters stop just about every plan to build or upgrade them. They're basically trying to make their own predictions come true. Modern reactor designs simply can not meltdown. It's physically impossible, natural disaster or not. We need to be replacing our old reactors with these new designs... sadly we are not.

This scenario evokes International Rescue. Obviously that says I'm old.

They will have to build something to carry this stuff. I imagine it'll be big and green and kind of look like a frog. It'll have a modular container system so it can carry different payloads for different disasters including one with a submarine.

This plan sounds good, and might actually be well planned. But only for a few years.

Then, plants will start using the existence of the backup capabilities as excuses not to build their own. And it will all be perfectly legal, as subtle rule changes are introduced with little public knowledge. You can already see the seeds of this in TFA:

The NRC staff said the industry initiative, called FLEX, may satisfy the proposed order to mitigate certain safety challenges.

The fox runs the nuclear hen house in the US, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been captured by industry.

Still, any plan is better than no plan. The length of time power was out and systems were down due to Hurricane Sandy should indicate just how long such emergency systems have to be prepared to operate. Multiple weeks of fuel must be kept on hand. Alternate water supplies must be identified.

Exactly!
ANY safety plan will always be degraded over time by cost-conscious managers who become confident that nothing bad will happen, until the level of preparedness drops below the threshold where a giant disaster happens, at which point it will all start again.

Exactly! ANY safety plan will always be degraded over time by cost-conscious managers who become confident that nothing bad will happen, until the level of preparedness drops below the threshold where a giant disaster happens, at which point it will all start again.

That's the central flaw in nuclear power always overlooked by the nuke fanboys: the profit motive. Corners will be cut, lies will be told, "unnecessary" safety precautions like earthquake monitors and evacuation drills will be eliminated to make

Why hello, fanboi! You're right, nuclear power cannot fail, it can only be failed! Each meltdown, whether it's Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, or Fukishima, is a No One Could Have Predicted disaster that in no way means we should re-examine the safety of nuclear energy!

Your bleating is ignoring the fact that nuclear power is by far the most expensive power source ever invented by man. Refining the ore, plant construction, plant maintenance, and of course waste disposal. We're literally talking about hundr

You've ruined pretty much all discussion on this story with your incessant ranting and arguments based only on emotion. Please move on to Digg or Fark or Reddit or some other such place where they like that sort of thing - we need less of it on Slashdot.

My god, you have no clue what you are talking about. The information is freely available to educate yourself. Please Please PLEASE go do some reading on how a nuclear plant works, why it generates heat after shutdown, and the causes of the Fukushima disaster before posting.

not a bad idea overall. Probably be cheaper and more efficient than mandating each site has backups for the backups for the backups for the....It could be a huge example of fraud and abuse though. store/buy old worn out shit repainted to appear new at new prices.

Hell the National Guard does this already just in case they need a few M16s in front of the local walmart. Be a good idea to combine these stores with air national guard sites for quick deployment.

...to run all this wonderful equipment. You can stabilize fuel, of course, but not forever. Eventually, you'll have to change it out, and dispose of the old stuff.

Quite frankly, old nuclear power plants that don't use passive safety systems and depend on grid electricity are an accident waiting to happen. A far better idea would be to design and build new plants

It is great that the industry is finally doing something. To be honest, I am amazed that FEMA did little about that in the past. However, that is not the real issue.
We are working with reactors that actually expired long ago. These should be taken down AND REPLACED. Not with coal, or Nat Gas, etc. but with a SAFE reactor that can burn up most of the current spent fuel.

GE's PRISMs could do this, but even better would be thorium reactors. It would be in the West's as well as America's and the nuke indust

Chernobyl wasn't a catastrophic failure, it was operating reactor well outside of the design parameters with all safety and auto-shut down procedures disabled.

What happened is that two tests - turbine vibrations and something else that had to do with cooling system were run concurrently, without considering implications. Safety system kicked in and proceeded to shut down whole thing. Junior techs that were on site decided they would chance disabling safety systems to try to keep reactor from going cold.

I just meant that Chernobyl happened fast. No backup system that would take more than a few minutes to kick in would have helped (whether it was on-site or merely nearby). Fukishima happened slow. Lots of time to bring backup systems on-line, or even fly them in from far away.

That is the only distinction I was trying to make.

In most countries without a communist past, the reactors do not have the same likelihood of fast catastrophes like Chernobyl's. We've pretty much made it very hard for those types o

Yes. Replacing the fleet means fighting interminable battles with activists armed with judges that injunct whatever they're told to. Even when we do grown-up things like create a law and a tax [wikipedia.org] to fund waste disposal it gets wrecked [slashdot.org] by statists [senate.gov]. Capital knows better than to have anything to do with US nuclear; the US electorate are hysterical children, bought a paid for with bennies and led around with FUD.

Nuclear power is out of our league now. We're just not competent to govern such things any longer.

In the case of a Fukishima type nuclear emergency, the US military already has the most of the equipment need for a quick response such as generators, armoured vehicles, radiation monitors, airlift etc. Under 18 U.S.C. 831, the Attorney General may request that the Secretary of Defense provide emergency assistance if civilian law enforcement is inadequate to address certain types of threats involving the release of nuclear materials. Such assistance may be by any personnel under the authority of the Departm

20 years ago, Ed Teller was a speaker at an Engineers Week banquet. He suggested instead of a few large nuclear plants with all complexities of sheer size plus containment vessel and security, make many smaller plants that are more manageable. I wish this was taped, I took some notes and published in one of local engineering society newsletters (did best I could capturing Teller's actual phrases). Seems to be a reasonable idea, a friend who was in Navy sub service said there are about 30 different emergency procedures (or steps?) on dealing with reactor problems. He feels large commercial plants are so complex, certain situations which can overwhelm operators. Of course there are many issues when dealing with lots of small nuclear power plants. I'm just throwing out some things I've heard.

Regarding a "rescue wagon" which I don't think will be practical. Unlike other disaster response plans (i.e. for various natural disasters), events of large scale nuclear disasters are very few in between. Having an effective team with resources will continually on "high state of combat readiness" will be very taxing with highly trained crews waiting years for The Big One. Perhaps if going with large nuclear plants, put in extra protection i.e. backup systems. Yes, these backup systems cost additional money but far cheaper than cost of the disaster itself if it were to occur. And some of these "once in 10,000 years events" do actually happen in your lifetime.

I actually think your argument tends to favor central "rescue wagon" teams. You either need a few central teams that can be airlifted to the site of trouble, or you would have to have an equivalent team in place at every facility. Seems like it would be more effective to have a few central teams, well trained, on 24-hr alert, then have to provide that same level of training and readiness in place at each and every facility.

Folks,I'd like to introduce you to "Extreme Damage Mitigating Guidelines" (EDMG), which are procedures created in response to NRC Security Order Section B.5.b. That order was created after 9/11/2001, when crashing airliners into important structures became a known tactic.

The industry response to the B.5.b requirements is not unlike what you would expect for Fukashima contingencies (you've lost large portions of your plant to widespread fires and destruction. How can you mitigate the release of radionuclides to the public when areas x,y and z of your plant are heavily damaged?)

A certain local nuclear power plant I'm familiar with has a diesel-powered pump stored onsite but far away from the power block. It's the exact same type of pump that would have saved the plants at Fukushima, and because of 9/11, we already had the pump, hoses, flanges, and connections required to inject cooling water into the reactor or steam generators under the most adverse conditions. This equipment and the required contigencies plans were in place a few years before Fukushima.

Now the post-Fukushima problem is a natural disaster could conceivably wipe out this B5B pump, putting this contingency plan at risk.That, presumably, is where this FLEX equipment comes in.If you can't count on ANYTHING onsite being available, then you need to have it stored safely offsite. If you're going to do that, might as well share the equipment and costs.One might argue about the size of the regions where this equipment is shared, but the FLEX equipment is:a backup plan (FLEX)to a backup plan (EDMG per B5B)to a backup plan (Severe accident mitigating guidelines and backup pumps and backup- backup generators that pre-date 9/11)to a backup plan (original emergency diesel generators and emergency operating procedures that have been at the plants from the start.)

Japan did not develop EDMG's after 9/11, and consequently were far behind the US nuclear industry in terms of emergency preparedness.

Now, the NRC has required a number of changes at existing and planned US nuclear facilities in response to the Fukushima meltdowns, however, that builds upon changes already made in response to the B5b regulations that came about a decade ago.

"oh wait no airports are open because they are all too damaged....what now?"

That's easy. Lift a crew in on military CH-47 and CH-53 helicopters, including Skycrane variants which can haul small tracked vehicles and other heavy gear. They can prep runways (you don't need an "airport" in a combat situation, just the runway) by clearing them enough for airlifters to bring the heavy equipment.

It's rather like deploying to a "bare base", which the US military have been training for longer than most Americans ha

Of course, cost is also realistic consideration, talk of "launching something into the sun" is made by people who don't understand orbital mechanics. The large delta-V for even reaching mercury is fearsome for a half ton object like the MESSENGER probe. we don't have the rockets to send 80,000 tons of nuclear fuel to the sun, nor the trillions of dollars to build such a fleet.

But the truth is our "spent fuel" is actually usable fuel, a gold mine of

talk of "launching something into the sun" is made by people who don't understand orbital mechanics.

Which is probably a majority of the human population. No sense getting a big head about it if you do.

Most people don't understand how automatic transmissions work, either, but you don't see me rubbing it in.

But the truth is our "spent fuel" is actually usable fuel, a gold mine of energy that can release seven or more times that which we've extracted so far, and at the end would leave only isotopes with very short decay time. we should not dispose of it but burn it in modern reactor designs.

Fair enough; so long as there's some solution other than the current "let's bury it somewhere and hope for the best" strategy.

And don't tell me it's cost - money isn't everything, especially when talking about compounds that have the potential to literally foul the planet for centuries.

That's mostly myth. There's very, very little in spent fuel, or any sort of transportable nuclear waste, that's all that dangerous long-term - and nothing should be transported or disturbed more than necessary for the first 5 years after use. (Despite this being very easy to get right, sure enough we've got it wrong before; go figure).

Most radioactive compounds aren't subtle: if they have a short half-life, you really don't want to be in line-of-sight for 10 half-lives, but after that they're just industr